Notes on Jurisprudence and the Law

Week One - Monday January 11, 2021

This semester, Rebecca is taking me to her class: Northern Jurisprudence and the Law. She has told all the participants, if they want to bring their mothers to class, go ahead.

 

I will be taking hand notes. I can't really type at the same time as I listen so I am having to trust my notes to get down the general ideas. 

She is saying that the course materials will be asking us to consider the following questions: What are the theories and practices that help with legal encounters? And with the intercultural encounters? 

Her questions will not be what is Inuit law but how do we learn about Inuit law through cinematic and legal texts? 

The class will interrogate the space of these encounters.

How do we listen to the storied encounters? 

How do we hear as others hear? 

The films we will watch are primarily texts from the south and the north about the North. 

The question I am going to keep asking myself is what are specific theories around intercultural encounter.  

I've been in another class with Rebecca that was theory-based. At the end of the day, the larger question amongst the students who were in the class was could any of us call ourselves theorists now that the lectures were finished.  Could we look someone else in eye and say “I theorize law.” The act of trying to say those four words caused a great deal of laughter among the class participants. 

In the class, I had studied texts that theorized law, but I couldn't say to others I theorize law. 

I theorize law. 

Is that what I am doing every time I interrogate a legal text? Am I theorizing when thinking about any text?

I don’t like to go into beak-out groups. Who does? All that to say, we were put in break-out groups: mix and match generated by the Zoom Goddess. Rebecca gave us questions to answer. 1) What is the farthest North you have been? What is the furthest south you've been? 2) What is your favourite film or film genre? 3) How many legal encounters have you had access to.

My answers were

)1 Hi-Level, Alberta;
2) My favourite film is often the one I am watching and can stay awake in. Presently that film is “The Two Glorias”.
3) Secwepemc, Tsuut’ina and I am going to try to flesh out this list 

Nyla, Nanook's wife
Image from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanook_of_the_North

When we were pulled back to the general session from the break-out group, Rebecca asked each group to share something they had learned during the break-out session. All of the answers made me begin to rethink my own answers, especially to question #1.

Next week we are to watch “Nanook from the North” before class, and the first 4 minutes of “Falling Down” (1993) starring Michael Douglas, which we viewed in class as well.

All the students are to write meditation on the class to Rebecca, one only she and they and see. Those meditations, they will use at the end of the class to make a summary of their experiences in the class about Northern Jurisprudence and film. That is worth 50% of their mark.

I am going to take my weekly meditations and blog them.  

No marks involved.

Arta